climategate

An extremely troubling series of events , exposed in late 2009, has been dubbed "Climategate". Thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England - a major source of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global warming data - were posted online, apparently by an internal whistleblower. The e-mails contained numerous references to statistical tricks and data manipulations used by extremely influential researchers to support the core assumptions of man-made global warming theory. These emails represent an unparalleled level of deceit.

A major contributor was Professor Philip Jones, head of the CRU. He was in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Several other prominent scientists were also involved, including geoscientist Michael Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. Mann was also the author of a previous deception. His infamous "hockey stick" graph which falsified historical temperature data in an attempt to prove human-caused climate change, was based on faulty data and statistical techniques. Originally touted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , it has now been pushed into the background.

To make matters worse, after a brief one-day probe by the British House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee, they said that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the CRU or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming. Thus there was an attempt to quickly sweep things under the rug.

As Mark Twain once said, "First you get the facts, then you can distort them any way you want"

Myths & Facts

MYTH: Temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times, but has sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years (the Mann, Bradley & Hughes "hockey stick" curve).

FACT: The Mann et al. curve has been exposed as a statistical contrivance. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that the 20th century changes in average global temperatures were unusual or unnatural.